SALEM — The hiring process has begun at the new Amazon delivery station in Salem, which company representatives say will create more than 100 full-time and part-time positions.
According to Amazon representative Emily Hawkins, the delivery station, located on 20 Colonial Road off of Jefferson Avenue, is scheduled to open in February.
“I want to welcome Amazon Logistics to the Salem business community and am encouraged about the addition of hundreds of new jobs to our local economy,” said Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll.
Job postings describe immediate openings for “warehouse team members” who would work “inside an Amazon warehouse, selecting, packing and shipping customer orders.”
While these job listings say that these positions start at $15 an hour, a press release from Amazon stated that new employees at the Salem delivery station would actually start at $15.45 an hour.
Amazon has also posted listings for Picker/Packers who will operate a garment press and a T-shirt folding machine, in addition to the normal fulfillment center tasks.
In addition to the positions directly employed by the company, Amazon representatives say that the service center will create hundreds more gig jobs for Amazon’s Delivery Service Partners and Amazon Flex drivers, who would be employed by third-party delivery service providers.
Amazon will be leasing the 148,000-square-foot space for its Salem station, the company’s ninth delivery station in Massachusetts and one of more than 150 across the country.
Packages are transported to these delivery stations from larger nearby Amazon fulfillment centers, sorted and then loaded into vehicles for final delivery to customers.
The massive corporation, valued at more than $1.7 trillion this August, has made headlines recently, with 6,000 workers in a Bessemer, Ala., warehouse set to vote next month to join Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which would be the first union in the company’s United States history.
“Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the United States, and they’re heavily, heavily anti-union,” Arthur Wheaton of the Worker Institute at Cornell University told National Public Radio. “So if you can start to get some of their U.S.-based (workers) successfully organized with the union, then that could lead to other cities also doing that.”
The organizing workers’ website, backed by the RWDSU, calls for safer working conditions, just-cause instead of at-will employment (meaning that an employee can be fired at any time for any reason with some exceptions) and standardized grievance procedures.
In a New York City Amazon warehouse, workers have expressed concerns about high injury rates, strictly-regimented productivity quotas, and frequent layoffs, according to a Guardian report.
More than 600 workers at this warehouse signed a petition last year calling for Amazon to improve work conditions, asking for a consolidated break, more reliable transport to the facility and called attention to safety concerns, according to the article.
“We prioritize the safety and health of employees above all else, and we invested more than $10 billion to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers throughout 2020,” said Amazon in a press release on the Salem station.
Amazon would not comment as to whether workers at the Salem delivery station would be subject to productivity quotas, whether they would be employed at-will, and whether the management would be amenable to a union.
